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J&J Lawsuit Shows How Talcum Powder Led to Ovarian Cancer
Jul 7, 2016 | The Ring of Fire Network
By Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder
Baby powder is one of the most commonly-used household products in America – but could it be a major cause of ovarian cancer? Earlier this year, a jury in Missouri ordered Johnson and Johnson to fork over $72 million to the family of a woman who claimed to develop ovarian cancer after using its branded baby powder. -
Another loss for J&J: Court sides with teenager in Risperdal case
Jul 7, 2016 | BioPharma Dive
By Nicole Gray
...To make matters worse, J&J is also facing numerous lawsuits alleging a link between the company's talcum powder and ovarian cancer. -
The Unfortunate Reality of Dry Shampoo
Jul 6, 2016 | The Atlantic
By Olga Khazan
...Several people noted that, whatever they do, people should avoid dry shampoos that use talc, a substance found in baby powders that has been at the center of several cancer lawsuits involving Johnson & Johnson.
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J&J Lawsuit Shows How Talcum Powder Led to Ovarian Cancer
Jul 7, 2016 | The Ring of Fire Network
By Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder
Baby powder is one of the most commonly-used household products in America –but could it be a major cause of ovarian cancer? Earlier this year, a jury in Missouri ordered Johnson and Johnson to fork over $72 million to the family of a woman who claimed to develop ovarian cancer after using its branded baby powder. Hundreds of other women are making the same claim.
Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder discuss this.
Transcript of the above video:
Seder: Pap, this week there was a huge award ordered by a state jury in Missouri against Johnson & Johnson for the company’s, I guess, knowledge that the talcum based baby powder in Shower to Shower that they were selling for years had the ability to cause cancer in some…
Papantonio: Yeah, Ovarian cancer. They said more than that, Sam. The attorney that handled this is a friend, and he’s a great lawyer. Jere Beasley. The reason we’re involved in this case, the reason I’m handling this case also, is because I really want women to understand that why would you possibly take a risk of using this Shower to Shower, or Johnson’s Baby Powder when there’s any risk of Ovarian cancer? The studies right now, actually as early as the 1980s, the studies started showing there’s a connection between the minerals that are found in this powder. Because it’s mined. It’s mined from the ground. This talcum is mined from the ground, but there’s minerals that cause inflammation in the organ systems. Anytime you have inflammation that sometimes leads to scar-based cancers, and what’s happening Sam, is that they’re finding the minerals that they can trace back to the powder in the tumors that are found in these women.
The question then becomes … You had the International Journal of Gynecological Cancer come out just … They did a study and they said, “Look. A woman who uses this on a regular basis has a 30 to 60% increase of Ovarian cancer.” It’s not a … That’s not a coincidence. Harvard did a study. They said … It was even more compelling. They said a women doesn’t even have to use it regularly. She puts herself at risk every time she uses it, because once that talcum … Once the minerals from the talcum powder absorb into the body they then become an … They create an inflammatory process. The Journal of National Cancer Institute talked about the use of talc in Ovarian cancer in 2014. They weren’t equivocal about their findings.
The interesting thing about this case is that this is information that Johnson & Johnson knew since the 1980s. The documents in this case are … They’re awful when you start determining what did they know. That’s what the jury reacted to. This wasn’t just … The question, Sam, was not only were they negligent. They obviously were negligent. The question was also, “Did they show reckless disregard for human life?”, and the jury came back and said, “Yeah, they did.” Sometimes if … Sam, if this were a medicine, if this were something that maybe was a life-saving medicine you had to take it, there’d be some risk-benefit analysis. There is risk-benefit analysis here. This is just absolutely no benefit.
Seder: My understanding is that there was a sense within Johnson & Johnson that they knew that these … The reporting of these links was going to drive down their sales, and so they re-oriented who they were going to try, and sell this to. My understanding is too is that they had been basically aware they were going to have to pay the piper at one point, and have been preparing for this litigation in some way for maybe decades.
Papantonio: Yeah, they have. Matter of fact what they is they went out, and hired what I call “biostitutes.” Those are … You find ’em at places like Yale, and Princeton. They’re these scientists, or these professor types that will say anything for the right amount of money. What they did is they went out, and they phonied up some epidemiology. The epidemiology they tried to show that it’s impossible for this to cause Ovarian cancer even though you’re finding … You’re tracing the minerals right to the ovary. The problem is when you have a company like this that has this much head-start they get to change the epidemiology, because they secretly pay for the epidemiology to make it look like there’s no connection. That’s what they did here. That’s why Jere did such a wonderful job in this case. Actually working his way through that, and showing that that’s a fraud. That you can go hire a “biostitute”, which is nothing more than a scientific whore, for the right money, and they’re going to say whatever you want ’em to say. That’s what Johnson & Johnson did here in this case.
Seder: Pap, just tell us, in a case like this there are a lot of potential plaintiffs out there, so what happens next? You’ve had this … You have this award. I assume Johnson & Johnson tries to appeal. What … Walk us through what happens next.
Papantonio: What’s going to happen next is this. First of all you’re going to have lawyers that have virtually zero experience thinking, “I can go handle these cases.” They can’t. A guy like Beasley does the same thing we do. We specialize in these cases. This is what we do. (laughs) What ends up happening is very often you’ll have some lawyer go grab a bunch of these cases for people that need to have good representation, and they’ll end up making bad law in jurisdictions. This is what my prediction is on this case. You’re going to … It’s going to be like the scene in Jaws where the characters in the little rowboats, “I’m going to go catch the big white shark,” but what ends up happening is they do so much harm to the project itself.
What I always try to tell people is know who you’re hiring on something like this, because it can go bad for a lot of women. A lot of women are suffering from Ovarian cancer directly related to this talc, and so the question then becomes … You have to … Simply because somebody advertises and says, “I handle these cases,” you need to find out who they are, because I say that not just for … I say that, because they can upset the entire process, and a lot of people can be left out in the dark, because some lawyer who knew … Had no clue on what they were doing tried to handle this case against Johnson & Johnson, blew it, and made bad law that affects women all over the country. That the first thing I always talk about.
The second thing is that this case will continue … We’re going to continue … There’s going to be documents that keep showing up. The documents that Jere Beasley put in front of the jury are really bad. They showed really reckless disregard, terrible conduct by Johnson & Johnson, and that’s why the jury came back like they did. My prediction is those documents will even get worse as this case goes forward.
Seder: Wow. Really just amazing. I have to say that in the 10, now gosh 12 years that I have known you, and I hear these stories from you that you deal with on a day to day basis, when you find these documents in these corporations, and I am … I still have the ability to be amazed at the callousness, and just the sheer sense that these folks, because they’re making a dollar, owe nothing to the general public, or their customers. It is shocking to me. Pap, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you much.
Papantonio: Thank you, Sam.
http://trofire.com/2016/07/07/jj-lawsuit-shows-talcum-powder-led-ovarian-cancer-2/
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Another loss for J&J: Court sides with teenager in Risperdal case
Jul 7, 2016 | BioPharma Dive
By Nicole Gray
Dive Brief:Johnson & Johnson (J&J) lost yet another Risperdal case, this time involving a teenager who developed breasts after taking the drug for psychiatric purposes. The Philadelphia jury awarded $70 million to the affected family, the plaintiff's law firm reported on Tuesday. J&J has previously plead guilty of to misbranding Risperdal for unapproved uses in adult patients. The drug for treatment of adults in 2002 and for children in 2006. Federal investigations, as well as class-action lawsuits, date back to 2012. The company has repeatedly expressed its sympathy for the boys and young men whose suffering have led them to file suits. Nonetheless, the company says that the evidence does not support the outcomes of the cases which J&J has lost. Dive Insight:This latest case is one of thousands of lawsuits that have been filed against J&J because of the impact of Risperdal on the development of breasts in boys (a condition known as gynecomastia). Already, J&J has lost four cases and faced a split jury on a fifth.
The cases are not going away, and as the losses mount, J&J must also deal with its image, which has been tarnished from this ongoing scandal. To make matters worse, J&J is also facing numerous lawsuits alleging a link between the company's talcum powder and ovarian cancer.
In both situations, the plaintiffs' lawyers contend that J&J knew about the risks associated with the medication and failed to disclose the information. Dr. David Kessler, a former FDA Commissioner, has offered testimony saying that J&J knew about the risks of Risperdal-induced gynecomastia but failed to share that knowledge with patients and parents.
Although subtle gynecomastia often occurs in adolescent boys, especially during periods when their hormones are unbalanced, Risperdal-induced gynecomastia can be more dramatic and has reportedly led to breasts growing as large as 46DD, reports Stat.
The financial impact to the company has not been insignificant, and the latest $70 million verdict is the steepest yet. Even before the cases started going to trial, J&J paid the Department of Justice more than $2.2 billion in 2013 to resolve civil and criminal investigations related to the marketing of Risperdal and other drugs.
http://www.biopharmadive.com/news/another-loss-for-jj-court-sides-with-teenager-in-risperdal-case/422134/
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The Unfortunate Reality of Dry Shampoo
Jul 6, 2016 | The Atlantic
By Olga Khazan
There’s a common pattern with socially constructed beauty norms. Society insists women do a ridiculous thing to look good (see: unnaturally small waists; looking awake and vibrant 24/7; heels as standard formalwear.) Women, being people, clamber to find short-cuts to accomplish said thing as easily as possible (see: corsets; makeup; removable heels.) The arms race continues until the norm goes away (see: menswear-for-women) or a harder-to-imitate beauty trend emerges (balayage).
You can see this dynamic at work in a newish, miraculous, terrifying innovation called dry shampoo.
The stuff is the best friend of the lazy-yet-vain. When sprayed onto hair, it soaks up oil, giving the impression of freshly washed and styled coif in seconds. Since I discovered dry shampoo a few years ago, I have regularly slept in for an extra 15 minutes while the rest of the world climbs groggily into their showers like a bunch of chumps. (Well, everyone except Jim Hamblin). Then, I would get to skip the blow-drying and heat-styling in which chumps of the female persuasion often engage—another 10 or 15 golden snooze minutes. With just one product, I was able to add another reality TV show to my rotation read more books for work.
When I woke up, I would tip my head upside down, spray on the shampoo, shake my head a bit, flip it back over and grin at the reflection of my fluffy bouffant, in a move I like to call the Grimy Laker Girl.
“That’s disgusting,” my boyfriend would say. “You know people stopped cleaning themselves with powders in like the 18th century, right?”
I ignored him, since he didn’t even own body wash until he met me.
I would look and smell clean when I was anything but. At first, the dry shampoo was just a stop-gap until the next day, when I would cleanse myself with actual water. But eventually my dry-shampoo days started outnumbering the regular-shampoo ones. Some mornings I would even do my trusty “15-minute Dumbbell Blast” routine and then head on into the office, my head coated in a thin patina of rice starch and “clean fragrance.”
I started recommending dry shampoo to busy and tired female friends, in the conspiratorial tone that Not-An-Actresses use in infomercials. “Feel my hair. FEEL IT,” I would demand. Then, the big reveal: “I haven’t showered since Tuesday.”
Gradually, though, I began to notice something disturbing. The two sides of my hair looked like they were slowly drifting away from each other at the part. Granted, it’s hard for me to tell when my hair is thinning. I am half Scandinavian, and nowhere is this more evident than my scalp, which, with its sparse, wispy growth, conjures the snowy white tundras of Lapland.
Still, a few dozen strands would defect from my head and onto my fingers each time I showered. It was a lot, even for me.
“Does my hair look thinner to you?” I asked my boyfriend one morning.
“Hmm, yeah maybe,” he said.
Figuring he has expertise in this area (he’s basically bald), the next morning I anxiety-Googled “dry shampoo hair loss.”
I saw a lot of headlines like, “Is Your Dry Shampoo Making You Go Bald?” (Reader, the answer is never “no.”) I also found a terrifying photo, posted on Facebook by a woman in Belfast, showing a bald spot she believes was caused by over-using dry shampoo. “Dry shampoo caused me to now have this bald patch on my head, (which I still have and it may or may not grow back, but nothing can be done),” she wrote, somehow summing up the fears of all of womankind in a single parenthetical. “Just wash your hair people!”
Of course, the problem with the wise woman’s counsel is that I’ve previously read(and written) about how showering and shampooing too often is also not good for your dreads. Damned if you ‘poo, it seems, damned if you don’t.
To get to the bottom of this, I unscientifically polled 11 hair experts and dermatologists about how frequently, if ever, I’m supposed to launder my hair, and with what.
According to them, women have fallen prey to a mass delusion that dry shampoo is actually shampoo. It’s not, in that it doesn’t clean your hair. It soaks up excess oil, and in the process, it irritates your scalp. That can lead to hair loss, as can the clumping that dry shampoo and other hair sprays sometimes cause.
“[Dry shampoo] deposits substances to coat the follicle that can build up,” Sonia Batra, a dermatologist in Los Angeles, told me. “The resulting inflammation can weaken the follicles and increase shedding. These products can also cause hair follicles to stick together, so that a hair that would normally shed during brushing may take two or three strands along with it.”
The good news is that only three of my respondents asserted definitively that yes, dry shampoo makes hair fall out. Sadly, the bar they set for its depilatory potential was pretty low. One hair stylist said all it would take is using it three days in a row, while a dermatologist advised against three days per week, consecutive or not. Dhaval G. Bhanusali, a dermatologist in New York, drew an even harder line, saying dry shampoo on more than two days per week would be excessive. Several people noted that, whatever they do, people should avoid dry shampoos that use talc, a substance found in baby powders that has been at the center of several cancer lawsuits involving Johnson & Johnson.
Sigh, first canned soups, and now this? Must all time-savers be secretly harmful? I asked the experts how often, then, we should regular-shampoo. Their consensus was every two days or so. Or even more often, if you, like yours truly, have very fine hair that starts to look like the unctuous coat of a baby sea lion about three hours after you step out of the shower.
Oh, and the idea that you can somehow “train” your hair to “adjust” to less-frequent shampoos—a dream of mine since I read this Hairpin article five years ago—is a myth, according to my killjoy respondents.
“Cutting back on how frequently you shampoo won't necessarily cure an oily scalp or cause your scalp to produce less oil. You either have an oily scalp or you don’t—just like your complexion,” said Rebecca Kazin, an assistant professor of dermatology at Johns Hopkins.
It’s time for me to set a trend that can compensate for all this bleak news. I hear models are shaving their heads, y’all. Get on it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/07/the-unfortunate-reality-of-dry-shampoo/489989/
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